Rockstor is a free and open source NAS (Network Attached Storage) operating
system. It’s a software solution and can be installed on commodity hardware
or a hypervisor satisfying Minimum system requirements

Yes. Rockstor is optimized to do less writes if it detects the root
drive to be USB flash drive or SSD. As expected, USB 2.0 can be pretty
slow. So we recommend a USB 3.0 drive even if your motherboard doesn’t support
USB 3.0 as it’ll still be faster. You can also purchase a 16 GB USB 3.0
drive from our shop and
support our effort!

Yes. If your motherboard has a spare PCI-Express slot you can get an SSD boot
drive from our shop.
This is a cheap yet much faster alternative to a USB flash drive. Here’s a short
blog post with more information.

Little to nothing, depending on how you choose to receive software updates. You
can download and install Rockstor from the ISO file free of cost. However, we
release rolling updates. These updates are divided into a Stable channel and a
Testing channel. Testing channel is free, but access to Stable channel requires
a small subscription fee. See Update Channels for more information.

Rockstor supports popular file sharing protocols like Samba/CIFS, NFS, SFTP and
AFP. Linux, Apple and Windows clients can easily share files using
Rockstor. Rockstor also supports apps like OwnCloud, Syncthing and others in
the form of Rock-ons (Docker Plugins) that provide more advanced and easier ways to
share and access your files.

Rockstor development happens at a reasonably fast pace. We create test releases
almost every other day. Once we are satisfied with a batch of changes, we
release a stable update. This happens roughly once or twice a month.

While we make major releases that require complete OS install, we try to make
these releases as infrequent as possible. However, we constantly improve
Rockstor and push tested updates in small batches which can be updated online
right from the web-ui. We do this because we want our users to get the best of
Rockstor without any unnecessary disruption or delay.

This is a very important question and a lot of our work with Rockstor revolves
around minimizing data loss. There are a few measures you can take to prevent
dataloss and have disaster recovery strategy for different possibilities. See
Data loss Prevention and Recovery in Rockstor. Also note that the btrfs raid5/6 profiles are not currently
recommended for production use.

Do you have examples on how to build complete NAS solutions for different storage capacities?¶

Rockstor is hardware agnostic, so you can build a complete Linux, BTRFS powered
NAS solution using the Rockstor NAS OS and hardware of your choice. If you are a
home-user/prosumer, read 8TB DIY NAS using Rockstor. For a bigger
storage footprint, read 240TB DIY NAS using Rockstor
. The only requirement is that the system be of a 64bit Intel or compatible
architecture.

I run a small organization with 10TB and growing data needs. How can Rockstor help me?¶

With Rockstor, you can scale your infrastructure with low incremental cost to
support your growing data needs. You can have very large storage capacity,
limited only by system resources like CPU, RAM etc. Feel free to contact us with your questions.

BTRFS is a newer Linux filesystem and is under heavy development. Some
commercial Linux distribution vendors are supporting it to various levels and
others will follow very soon given that the stability has improved quite a
bit. So for now, you have to answer that question yourself based on data and
your risk. In our experience, BTRFS has become very reliable. Also, Rockstor
confines users from using BTRFS more freely, thus reducing the chances of
hitting deep intricate bugs. The fact that BTRFS bugs being reported lately are
only triggered by very special scenarios is an encouraging sign.

However a proviso here is that The BTRFS community consensus is that raid5 and
raid6 levels of btrfs support are not yet fully stable and so are *not
recommended for production use*. Please see the btrfs wiki for up to date
information on all btrfs matters.

Why does Rockstor support only BTRFS and not other Linux filesystems?¶

BTRFS is in it’s own league among Linux filesystems and we see tremendous value
in building over it and making it’s advanced feature set easily accessible to
users. While there are other excellent filesystems, we plan to focus on
providing the best solution based on BTRFS.

Thanks for asking and welcome to the Rockstor community. Depending on your
needs and interests, there are a few ways to participate. See
Contributing to Rockstor - Overview for more details. Don’t feel shy and e-mail any of
the developers if you like to discuss more before jumping in!